PSA: This is not TA or FA or SC2 or...

I'm almost sad they had you remove the hand from your avatar. It suited your demeanor nicely, and served as a warning.

The funny thing is, rcix is actually quite correct in his approach. If you want to design a game, you want a setting that is completely open and non-hostile. Any ideas brought forth are to be noted, improved, and the stored somewhere. Never do you shoot them down.

Then you list all of the ideas, pick the best ones, and build the game on those.

It generates way better stuff then every new idea being shot down instantly, thus never reaching the point where the poor idea is improved by positive feedback into a brilliant idea.

Every idea has been suggested, since about mid-october if not earlier.

Just forget about it. Most people on this forums can't are not even reading suggestions they "don't want". They read topic/first few lines, especially not further corrections and fixes and drop line like "if you think that this is problem, you are just noob, this game is not for you". Read forums, comment on ideas you like in constructive way, note tehm and ignore dontwantsayers with overgrown ego. When time would come - mod them and test them.

Nor Uber, nor anyone here on forums can't tell from just look of the idea if it's good or not. Only way to tell this apart is to test your idea. If you modded something and some people play it and like it - you done a good job. More good mods and ideas you would implement, more your reputation will grow and more your word will cost. Dontwantsayers are not making anything ever (including constructive criticism), so as soon as real work will start they all will be trashed.

How I always try and approach posting on forums:
(And sometimes I can't even post without breaking my own mantra)

1. Criticism is good in almost every case - as long as it is constructive. There's no perfect solution to any problem and even good systems can be improved upon. It's like the evolution of making swords. They were made from different materials throughout history but they were all swords. Bronze, Iron and Steel were all the best thing to make swords out of at the time, but each one was an improvement over the last. Even though fundamentally they were the same. Same as the wheel example really.

2. We can learn a lot from the past. "A wise man learns from his mistakes, a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others". The previous games that are the inspiration for PA all had their good and bad points. None of them were perfect, but all of them had things they did well. Just because people reference these games does not mean that they aren't prepared to accept change or move with the times. It is simply identifying the benchmark to which new ideas must be measured. If an idea is good then it will stand up in it's own right.

3. People always think they are right. It's the internet after all. Thinking you are right does not automatically make you right. Furthermore, trying to quantify why you are right purely based on you playing 1,000,000,000 hours of TA and SupCom doesn't mean you are right either. Weighing in your considerable experience in game design, modding or being a pro player is all good and well, but it doesn't absolve you of the need to explain your critique. If it's been said before then that just saves you typing. Link to the relevant topic and do everyone a favour.

4. Being polite when you are pointing out the potential flaws in someone's idea will earn you a lot more kudos and will make people more receptive to your argument. Even when you think you know you are right (see above) consider that yours might not be the only right way to do something. In this case, try and discuss the pros and cons of an idea without making it personal. It mostly just stops people from taking you seriously when you resort to insults.

5. Even the very worst of bad ideas deserve to be dissected and discussed. If you don't think a suggestion deserves your time then why even take the time to post in the first place? While it may be true that you cannot polish a turd, it is still worth discussing said turd in the hope that the OP will learn from their mistakes and post better in the future. Insults won't educate people. It is not just a case of saying "learn to post better" either. Encourage people to lurk moar and show them where the information they need can be found.

6. Good ideas should be criticised too. See point 1. Also consider that contrary to a lot of posts from folks trying to defend their suggestions, opinion does count for something. Particularly if it is the popular opinion on the forum. Sure an idea may work, it might even improve on some aspects of a previous system. However, if the general consensus is that it is not what is right for the game, then maybe there's something to it. Opinion is what made TA popular and is the reason for it's success. If popular opinion was that TA was a bad game, then we would never have had SupCom.

7. Uber read the forums and will use their best judgement to either include or omit forum suggestions as they see fit. I think they will do a good job, but even they don't have the foresight to see exactly what the end product will be. I've seen more than one occasion where Uber have either changed their approach or decided to include or omit something based on discussions on these forums from this community. What we say here does matter. After all we are the kickstarter community that funded the game. We are the fans and buyers of the previous games and we will be the end users of the finished product. It is in no small part because of us that Uber can make this game. We need to remember that when we post here.

I tend to think better when in a hostile environment.
Not quite like Mordor, but surrounded by critics.
"X is bad because Y" is good
"X is bad because X,Y,Z,A,B..." is great.
"X is bad and you should feel bad" is not great. Nor good.
I'm not saying do constructive criticism like "In order to improve X try A,B, etc", because that takes all the fun out of it.

Already had one flagged post in this thread, so I'll just pop in and say: Attack the idea, not the person. Everyone is encouraged to debate concepts, designs, etc. Just please don't let it devolve into slapping each other around.

Carry on.

You think it's bad atm? Bring on the alpha.

In game design, being open to criticism is critical.

Someone saying "That idea is stupid, here's why:" while not diplomatic, happens pretty often depending on the people talking.

Saying "You're stupid" however.. that's where it becomes not ok, and at least on the forums, where posts start to get deleted.

Don't conflate someone telling you have a bad idea with telling you that you are bad. And vice versa. If someone is attacking you, instead of the idea, it's generally because they don't actually have a better idea ;-)

Bingo, ayceeem nailed it. Don't forget bringing back Mr. Lowrie to do the narration for the promo video as well.

Certainly my hope, based on the advertising, when I chipped in a couple of hundred bucks was that PA mainly *is* TA plus the best bits of SC/SC2 and a limited number of (awesome!) new ideas that extend but do not fundamentally change TA's gameplay. Let's leave the radical changes for mods or some sequel to PA.

This is what I've always said. Inspired by TA with a modern UI and some new cool stuff too (smashing asteroids).

I wonder how much people from community actually actively plays Total Annihilation? Or at least played it for a few month in past year? I fear that all this TA-inspiration is more like nostalgia. As one who played SupCom before TA I might say that i would prefer opposite situation - SupCom with some changes to remove most weird situations. But this could be modded (and it will be, I sure of it, if PA would retract from SupCom too much, especially with core game mechanics), so I don't worry about that.

But what I'm really interested is UberEnt opinion about what is good and what is bad in SupCom over TA. Like, we all know that SupCom's bubble-shields and T4's were leading to turtling parties more often than it should be.

Actually, we know a lot about game and client core by now - how UI would be implemented, how terrain would be generated and soon. It's all cool and nice and I hope that alpha will have modding and translating capabilities already so modding ground could be tested as well, but we never head anything solid about game logic and game design. We even know about graphics style and music style. But we don't actually know what game PA will be and I guess when it will strike ~half of community will be disappointed. I even fear that UberEnt themselfs not sure about what exactly they are doing.

During the past year, I've played a decent amount of TA, most notably the Twilight mod (which is a balance mod that tries to remain true to vanilla TA). I've also played an equal amount of FA, and a small amount of Zero K (which I only recently learned about). While Supcom has a lot of improvements, TA's gameplay holds up to this day through mods like Twilight.

Where I feel that Twilight works out better is that the units are better balanced and have more variety. The balance comes from the fact that it's been tweaked for about a decade to reach its current point. The variety comes from the huge number of unit choices available to the player. The selection of Arm gunships alone is a wonder to behold. (And each of them is useful at nearly all stages of the game.)

FA balance is hindered by the fact that it's had less time to mature, and official support from GPG ended long ago. FAF tweaks do make things cleaner, but inconsistencies remain. As for the variety, that can't be fixed as easily due to the 3 tier system in place. Mods like Black Ops are attempting to bring in that variety though.

That said, I do think that FA is the more enjoyable, more strategic game for me, but all the aspects that make it great can easily be ported back to TA to bring it up to the same level.

The thing is, with the exception of certain gameplay changes, TA and FA are essentially identical games. I feel that what the devs are doing for PA is reverting some of the gameplay changes that they feel worked better in TA, such as a 2 tier system, unit variety, lack of shields, etc, while keeping the best parts of FA, such as the strategic zoom, huge scale, improved UI, etc. In this case, defining PA comes down to semantics. It ends up having more features derived from TA (especially since many of those features were utilized by FA), so saying that PA is closer to TA is simply a statement based on the number of features derived. But then, don't forget that it's adding its own set of features (the planetary scale, for example) much in the way that FA added features.

So in the end, there's really nothing to be concerned about. The core gameplay mechanics will end up being closer to what you want than not.

You are casting a lot of fear around there. People working at Uberent were involved in TA and SupCom1/2 and each game was great in their own right. With lessons learned from prior games and the experience in building games, plus more tools in modern game design it seems more than a little pessimistic to suggest that they dont know what they are doing and are developing PA without a plan in mind as to how it is going to turn out.

You say "we dont actually know what game PA will be" and imply that the community knows little about the state of the game so far and you think that half the community will be disappointed? I think that is a little demanding, Uber have been very transparent in showing us everything they have to show thus far and frequently jumping into forums and live streams in order to have the community better filled in. I dont think we could be better informed about what kind of game it is shaping up to be unless we were looking over their shoulders while they coded. It isn't like most game development when there may be a few updates and hype filling in the rest. This is about as grounded as community expectations come during development because we are seeing everything as it is put together with very little left to the imagination/hype machine.

Finally to suggest that the community may just be operating on nostalgia really sounds a little baseless. Whilst I am sure that many people no longer play TA regularly, there has been extensive talk about the mechanics of SupCom and TA and quite technical discussions at that.

I guess my point is to settle down a bit. Don't be fearful that Uber are going in blind, and use the evidence of the discussions in the community to observe the expectations of the majority of the community. Most have played SupCom and many of us have played TA and we are aware of what this kind of RTS involves.

I actually reïnstalled TA recently and played through the campaign. It's quite excellent from a gameplay perspective, just the AI and UI are a bit lacking.

I think no one has nothing against new ideas. It's just the ideas like "I think x needs to be removed/prevented because... because... well, that's just my opinion." (for example preventing ACU sniping & no more 100 engineers around a factory.)

Even when there is nothing game breaking in x, some people keep saying that it should be removed or prevented. This is just completely unfair since it's all based only on your opinion and there are many people that disagree with you. No arguments and no reasons why it's a bad thing, it's just your opinion and you're forcing us to swallow it.

SO, if you want to remove or prevent something, please say why was it bad thing and why it needs to be removed/prevented. "I just don't like it" is not a valid argument.

What about (It goes against the spirit of what the game is trying to be?)

While highly subjective, it doesn't mean the use of certain mechanics that don't promote the type of play that the game has been designed for have to stay.

Actually while I haven't played TA in a while, I did just burn through SC1 and FA's campaigns. And honestly I wouldn't mind just having Sup Com in space.

While I realize that we need to keep moving the genre forward. Some suggestions just aren't very good.

I think we've been doing a good job of supporting the good ideas and shooting down the bad ideas. And to be fair, in any creative endeavor, you are always going to get more terrible suggestions than good ones. That's just the way brainstorming works.

So for example a while ago when the game was first coming up on kickstarter and reddit there were two questions that I remember coming up, that ended in two different ways. "Will the planets orbit in space?" and "Do we want the Sup Com tech tiers?". With orbiting we we had this sliding scale between planets locked in space, and full on physics simulation. And in multiple threads, and a few polls, most people settled on simple orbits, with planets spinning around each other in simple circles and ellipses, and this stuff should really be optional when you are setting up the map. And based on the latest Uber livestream it looks like that's what we are going to get.

And with the tech levels, people had find memories of the way the tiers worked in TA SC. But they felt that with three tech levels, the second tier was just sort of this hurdle that never really got used, and that a two tech tier system would probably work best. Some ideas work, some don't.

And also before going on about the "Oh you are all stuck in the past" PA is in space. It's an RTS on multiple planets. If that's not enough, then how crazy of a gimmick do you want?

I agree with this!

Unfortunately rcix, I have to agree with the mean bad men on this one.

I don't have a problem with you posting ideas. What I DO have a problem with is that many of them have either been posted/discussed ad nauseum in other threads (see the "search" feature), or there really isn't any visible compelling reason to do it, other than for eye candy.

I refer you to a thread that is laid out in a way that encourages good comments.
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=41715

Please take note. Whether the idea ultimately turns out to be good or bad, he clearly put thought into it, has a goal that is well thought out, and he has provided enough detail to actually have workable feedback.

I realize that your ideas may not be fully fledged when you're ready to post them. NOBODY is expecting you to be starting a thread with an idea that is so polished that it can be immediately implemented as code. What we ARE expecting is that it isnt something you thought up 10 minutes ago, and posted a one-liner expecting to have it turn into something magnificent.

As an example, I refer you to a thread you posted earlier (I just went back and found the highest one on the forums authored by you)

"Are we going to be rolling with a "damage is damage" setup? Or have the devs considered something a bit more nuanced, such as different damage types or even just a representation of armor?"

Aside from the fact that I'm sure this has been discussed before, you didn't contribute ANYTHING to the discussion about it. A better post would have included at least a framework sketch of what kind of damage types and armor you would like to see, and how they address some fundamental problem you saw in a prior game (be it TA, FA, or any other RTS)

For those who TLDR'd, the summary is this: Post something well thought out, and we will too. We are not obligated in ANY way to defend your ideas when you can't supply enough details to defend.